The Czech republic and Slovakia held activities on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of the invasion by Warsaw Pact armies in then Czechoslovakia.
Czech president Vaclav Klaus and his Slovak counterpart Ivan Gasparovic visited an exhibition of photographs from 1968 that is on the public display in Safarik Square in the center of Bratislava.
The presidents viewed photographs by Ladislav Bielik from the first days of Czechoslovakia's occupation by the foreign armies.
Klaus and Gasparovic also laid wreaths at the memorial to three victims of the Soviet occupation that is placed on the stairs of Comenius University in Bratislava.
The current generation of politicians should try to prevent a similar situation from repeating, the two presidents said at a meeting marking the 1968 events.
"It is a joint black chapter in the Czech and Slovak history," Gasparovic said, adding that tanks could never bring freedom.
Later in Prague, Klaus said at a meeting marking the event's 40th anniversary that the Czech society should overcome the trauma stirred up by the Warsaw Pact troops' occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
Czech and Slovak prime ministers, Mirek Topolanek and Robert Fico, opened an exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in Prague.
Certain exhibits, including the tank of the same type as those invading Czechoslovakia in 1968, are placed outside the National Museum.
At the same day, the Czech republic and Slovakia also held activities in other cities of both countries.
On the night of August 20-21, 1968, more than 200,000 Warsaw pact troops including the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Poland entered Czechoslovakia to halt a period of political liberalization.
The Soviet troops' presence on Czechoslovak territory was later "legalized" by a treaty that the National Assembly (Czechoslovak parliament) approved in October 1968.
The last Soviet soldiers left the country only 23 years later, following the collapse of the communist regime in 1989.
Source:Xinhua
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